Larry Parsons: Word nerd airs rant on language

If you write for your supper, there is a real danger of becoming a word nerd.

I have been inclined to toss drinks into the faces of people who cannot appreciate the difference in meaning between compose and comprise.

The only thing that held me back was realizing that if I wasted a drink in making a point about correct usage, I would have to write more to earn more money for another drink to compose myself.

By the way, there is a simple scenario you can do to check whether compose or comprise is the right word for the moment.

It involves a zoo and zoo animals and describing their relationship in two different ways. Avoid getting sidetracked by what the mean, accurate-throwing spider monkey did to you once at the San Francisco Zoo, and you'll never tremble before the compose-comprise conundrum.

Frankly my word nerdom has eased as the years mounted. The proliferation of texting abbreviations I don't understand and care not a whit (ICNAW) to understand has helped me take a more live-and-let-live attitude toward the living language.

Still, there is a two-word combination that exists only in the heavy breathing world of crime reporting that triggers my residual word-nerd disdain for the cheap and shabby. Sadly the half-life for this abominable cliche appears to be 10,000 years.

When a crime, be it murder most foul or a Peninsula tree being trimmed sans permit, occurs outdoors sometime between dawn and dusk, it invariably is said to have happened in "broad daylight."

Now Eskimos are said to have several dozen different words for snow, depending on mass, quantity, texture and other fine distinctions about the cold stuff.

And classical scholars say Homer employed at least 60 ways to say someone died in his yarn about the Greeks and Trojans. Well, Homer was a poet, but he never said a Trojan warrior perished when hit by a bus in broad daylight.

Why then are there two forms of daylight? What the heck is broad daylight anyway? And how does it differ, say, from daylight?

Is it daylight packing a few extra pounds above the belt? Or is it daylight somehow reminiscent of what my mother charitably would call a woman "with heavy bones?"

Do non-felonious, daytime activities like fly-fishing, picnicking or taking the top off the convertible occur in slender or slim or svelte daylight?

My theory for this odd time element, which only calls for mishaps and mayhem occurring in broad daylight, is that the word "broad" has alliterative juice with other adjectival crime cliches — such as "brutal" and "brazen."

"Brutal things happen brazenly in broad daylight. Breaking news brimming at 6 p.m." Now that's punchy. Bratwurst, too, would fit nicely in this word chain. But eat too many bratwursts and daylight won't be the only thing that is broad. Or as my mother would say, "heavy-boned."